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Re: [Asrg] HTML-burdened unsolicited mail

At 6:31 PM -0500 6/19/03, gep2@terabites.com wrote:

 > The reality is that there is great demand for "rich text"
messaging and there always has been.

Perhaps, but RARELY among those who:

   1)  appreciate the cost differential, and

   2)  understand what it means.
Which pretty much means only the techie community, and a small proportion of that. This is a pointless discussion. The vast majority of end-user email is HTML. They use bold and italics in all their other applications. They embed cutesy images in all their other applications. Why shouldn't they in email? Cost differential? They really don't care. And then of course there is commercial, requested email, which is virtually 100% HTML. Let's discuss something more feasible--like replacing SMTP with a new system overnight.

And if they REALLY WANT to use HTML, another approach without most of the bulk
is to put it up on a Web server (using an 'unguessable' URL) and E-mail (as
plain ASCII text) the URL to the intended recipient.
Sure. I'll just tell my father that when he wants to emphasize something he shouldn't hit Apple-B, he should pay his ISP for a web host and learn how to publish on it. Or were you instead proposing that everyone in the world upgrade their email client to something that uses "pull" instead of "push"? Please can we be serious?

A lot of anti-spam people spend way too much time looking at spam, and not nearly enough time looking at real email. The only real email they see is from other techies. So they assume that when there is a difference between spam and their real email--the difference is something specific to spam.

In fact, for the average non-techie, spam looks an awful lot like their real email. (That shouldn't be terribly surprising if you stop and think for a minute.)

Do you want numbers?

I have a collection of non-spam email sent by average, clueless users to their friends, and inadvertently cc'd to me via wormalert@somewhere.com. Messages are over the past year.

Total Messages: 98,111
Total text/plain or no content-type: 26,235

Plain text is accounting for 26% of good email in that sample of the non-techie community. Want to shudder? 34% was multipart/mixed and 29% was multipart/alternative.

The anti-html-email war was lost years ago. It's right up there with "html is for describing structure, not appearance". I used to fight it too, but it's time to move on.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Anti-Spam Service for your POP Account
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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